Email sent to Dr. Daniel Griffith's
colleagues at the University of Texas, January 29, 2008, explaining that they
have a unique responsibility to correct the disinformation that Griffith has
been feeding the public about the Mecca orientation of the crescent.

Your help
is urgently needed to help expose and stop an enemy plot against the United
States. You may or may not be aware of the controversy over the Crescent of
Embrace memorial to Flight 93, to be built in the shape of a gigantic Islamic
crescent and star flag:

Crescent
of Embrace
publicity photo (left). Wikipedia’s “typical”
Islamic crescent and star (right), colored red and viewed from a similar angle.
The copse of trees that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic
flag marks the Flight 93 crash site.

Where do
you come in? It turns out that a person standing between the crescent tips and
facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca:

The green
circle in this graphic was generated by the
Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com, which uses the great circle
direction to calculate the direction to Mecca (the Muslim “qibla,” or prayer
direction), for any American city. Crescent bisector (red arrow) points 1.8°
north of Mecca, ± 0.1°. (Full Crescent of Embrace site plan
here.)

A crescent
or an arch shape giving the direction to Mecca is a well known construct in the
Islamic world. It is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which
every mosque is built:

The mihrab
of the
Great Mosque in Codoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca.

You can
also think of the Crescent of Embrace as a giant Muslim prayer rug (called a “musalla,”
which translates into English as “small mosque”).

It should
have been an easy matter to expose this explosive information. The problem is
that one of your colleagues, Dr. Daniel Griffith, has been covering up this
Islamic symbolism by making erroneous statements to the Memorial Project and the
press about the direction to Mecca. He told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette
that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor
at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca,
because the earth is round.

Neither
was Griffith misquoted. Kirk Swauger of the Johnstown Tribune Democrat
also talked to Griffith. “He said you can face anywhere to face Mecca,” Swauger
told me over the phone.

Is this
the position of the UT GIS department? That there is no such thing as a
direction on planet earth? Other obviously errant statements were made to other
newspapers. According to the Tribune Democrat:

Griffith studied Rawls’
assertions for Families of Flight 93. [He] said the geometry used for a sphere
such as the earth is different than the geometry for a two-dimension surface,
which Rawls is using as the foundation for his arguments.

Griffith knows full well that I calculated the direction to Mecca by
the great circle method, which is a spherical concept of direction. Griffith
even calculated the direction to Mecca himself and got the same answer I did.
This from an unpublished report Griffith wrote in 2006:

I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to
Mecca of roughly 55.20°.

I get
55.19° clockwise from north. (My calculations at the bottom
here.)

I have no
idea why Professor Griffith is propagating this disinformation. Does he have
some personal connection to architect Paul Murdoch? Does he think he is helping
the grieving families of Flight 93 by telling them what he thinks they want to
hear? Whatever his motivation, he is covering up the truth and protecting an
enemy plot.

I see from
Griffith’s web-page that he is actually an economist (my own background) rather
than a GIS person. Unfortunately, he has that GIS credential by his name, and
there are very few GIS professors in the country who can be appealed to for
equally credentialed counter-expertise. As far as I can tell, the only GIS
departments in the country are at UT and Oklahoma State. I am sending this
appeal to professors in both departments. Professor Griffith’s deceptions must
be publicly corrected by your departments.

It sounds
crazy that a professor could tell the press that there is no such thing as the
direction to Mecca and be believed, but this is in fact the state of affairs.
Griffith is also deceiving the Park Service, and the Flight 93 family group.

There are
a host of geometric claims about the crescent design that need to be fact
checked and publicized. Griffith’s deceptions have stopped all of this from
proceeding.

Here is a
second Mecca orientation that needs expert verification. A line across the tips
of the vast array of crescents of trees that surround the crescent shaped Tower
of Voices part of the planned memorial also points 1.8° north of Mecca, the same
as the giant central crescent, proving that neither orientation is a
coincidence:

The Tower
crescents are turned exactly 90° to the central crescent (where it is the
bisector that points just north of Mecca).

To see
that this Tower orientation matches the orientation of the central crescent,
just overlay the two:

Red and
blue make purple. The two orientations are identical, as closely as can be
determined given the pixel resolution of the graphics. The design included
numerous other proofs of intent as well, including repeated
exact Mecca orientations.

Another
Islamic element of the design might be a little out of the GIS field, but a GIS
person would certainly have the skills to verify that the center of the Tower
array turns out to be a year round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial:

In the
photo of the traditional Islamic sundial (left) the gnomon shadow is just
reaching the outer curved vertical, indicating time for afternoon prayers. Same
for the Tower of Voices (right).
Shadow calculations confirm that, on any day of the year, when the tower
shadow reaches the inner arc of trees, it will be time for Islamic afternoon
prayers. (South at the top in both images.)

The design
is also replete with
terrorist memorializing features. We hosted an open design competition in
time of war. Of course we should have expected that the enemy would enter and
try to win a memorial to their heroes instead of ours, which is exactly what
happened. The Crescent of Embrace is a terrorist memorial mosque. Initial uproar
over the bare naked crescent and star flag forced the Memorial Project to
disguise the crescent with a few irrelevant trees, but every particle of the
original crescent design remains
completely intact in the so called redesign.

This al
Qaeda sympathizing plot is succeeding, largely due to the efforts of your
colleague Daniel Griffith, and you are some of the only people in the country
who can overcome his malign influence.